Month: May 2015

Today’s adventures began with a walk around a couple parks here in downtown, and some sight seeing around the city center – such as the old PacBell building:

Then we had breakfast at de Vere’s Irish Pub, where I had the most delicious biscuits and gravy I have ever had…

The car was then pointed into a westerly direction and away we went. The first stop was the top of Mount Vaca – pretty much the highest point in the middle of California.

From here we could actually see the overcast and drizzle we would hit at our western most point today, Bodega Bay, about 80 miles out there in the distance –  under those clouds on the horizon.

Like any high point with unlimited view for a hundred miles, the top of Mount Vaca is festooned with antennas – one of which being this very cool (and very bald) cold-war era Army Radio Tower…

From here we trekked back down the mountain, only catching the brakes on Clinton’s CR-V lightly on fire in the process. 🙂

Eventually we made it to the next stop on our trek to the edge of the continent, the Mare Island Naval shipyard.

This Naval Base was essentially abandoned in place – meaning it is pretty much a ghost town mixed with a post-apocalyptic industrial setting that you expect to be overrun by zombies at any moment…

I’m really kind of surprised I’ve not seen Mare Island in a post-apocalypse / zombie movie yet – it is perfect for one… 😀

Once done with Zombieland we continued on to Bodega Bay…

Bodega Bay was cold, windy, overcast, and drizzling as we saw previously from the top of Mount Vaca…

After a few fridgid minutes we piled back into the car and pointed it at Sacramento, opting to return whence we came by way of a small ferry – just for S&G’s…

And once we’d made it back to civilization, we called it a night. Clinton has work tomorrow, and I have to get rested up for a long day of airplanes and airports that will see me getting home to my bed at about 12:30am… Just in time to get up at 5am and get to work so I can manage a security audit by a client…

Yay…

Overall though, this has been a fantastic micro-vacation! Thanks Clinton for dragging my sorry tail all over northern California.

I’m not going to be horribly verbose this evening as I am exhausted…

The day began with seeing the 9am showing of “Avengers – Age of Ultron” at the Esquire IMAX here in downtown Sacramento with Clinton. Being as this is an actual 70′ IMAX screen using two 70/15 projectors running at 48fps to create the 3D, the movie was absolutely mindblowing.

From here Clinton decicded I needed to see Lake Tahoe, so he pointed his CR-V eastward and away we went.

Along the way we ran into a very cool bridge: The Foresthill Bridge, which is 730 feet over the river it crosses… So I opted to walk the length of the bridge, round trip, to get some photos…

From here we pressed on and eventually ended up at Lake Tahoe, where I got to hike around the Tallac historic site for an hour and take pictures of how the 1% lived in 1920. 🙂

And from here we ended up on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe and stopped to have dinner at the Harrah’s Casino buffet… Thankfully all I’d had to eat prior to this was some popcorn at the theatre, so I was able to get my money’s worth in prime rib and fixins. 😀

Then we drove a hundred miles back to Sacramento, where I am now entirely exhausted and planning to call it an early night.

The day started off as it usually does, with me getting up at the break of dawn. I finished packing, got my affairs in order for while I am out of state, dealt with a few work things, and got out of the house at 08:30 for my 11am flight.

Being as it was Friday, and not 0-dark thirty in the morning, I knew the TSA line would be incredible so I wanted to ensure I had plenty of time to stand around. And being as I live a good half an hour from the airport, leaving at 08:30 would put me at DIA two hours before the flight…

The TSA line was about a half an hour long, the train ride was another 15 minutes, and getting to the veeeeery end of concourse A took another 15 or so minutes – so I had an hour to enjoy a nice, sedate cup of coffee.

Then I discovered the plane due to leave DIA at 11:05 would not even be arriving until 11:30. Which means it would not be departing DIA until at least noon – but probably closer to 12:30 with deplaning and boarding, and it is 2.5 hours to Seattle… Meaning I would not get to Seattle until 14:30 local…

I had a connecting flight in Seattle due to depart at 14:30 local…

On top of this the plane at DIA was smaller, so we were asked to check our bags versus carry them on – so my one carry-on was tagged and tossed onto the plane at the gate. I’ve never had much luck with random bag shenanigans resulting in my luggage arriving in the same place I am going.

As we pulled away from the gate, the pilot came over the PA to explain that he was going to attempt to make up some lost time by using some very high tech pilot stuff called “punching it” – and as we rocketed off the runway, engines screaming as we shot to 40,000 feet, I believed him.

To his credit, and the heroic efforts of the flight crew to prioritize folks getting off the plane, I made it to my connecting flight with three minutes to spare, and made it to Sacramento on time.

And even my bag made it!

A friend of mine, Clinton, picked me up at the airport and shuttled me to the hotel here in the heart of Sacramento to drop off my stuff, and then we trundled over to Winters California to a place called the Buckhorn Steakhouse for dinner.

It was amazing.

Along the way there and back I got to see a side of California I’ve never seen, as my trips here tend to center around L.A. or SanFran – farmland. There really are large sections of California that do not have a highrise building on them… Shocking!

Once we returned to Sacramento, we decided to walk off the steak by cruising Old Town Sacramento for a bit…

Old Town is interesting because it completely flooded, ages ago, and the solution to this problem back then was to elevate the roads by building new roads on top of the old ones, and either jack up the buildings to the new street level, or build new buildings on top of the old ones. So the whole town area has creepy weird basements made out of old ruined buildings, and some of those basements have basements!

So there is this wonderfully preserved ‘Wild West’ town in the center of as much newer town, sitting on top of a gold rush town…

And the mix of eras is jarring – but kind of neat…

Meaning you get scenes like this street, lined with preserved 1800’s era buildings, and at the far end of the street a super modern 21st century glowing ziggurat of an insurance building – and between them a 1900’s era steam powered paddlewheeler sitting on the river that has been converted into a hotel…

It’s a strange place. Neat! But strange. 🙂